Resource involvement in conferences

What is your involvement in parent/teacher conferences? In my first school, classroom teachers seemed to want me to mostly run the conference for my kids. I scheduled with them so there would be no conflicts and I could attend the entire conference for each of my students. When I was a classroom teacher, I understood that because the kids with IEPs had such poor grades on grade level assessments (we don't modify here) and I wanted the sped teacher to give some positives about IEP goals.

At my current school, I almost feel more like I'm in the way! Other service providers/my teammates will typically say things like "It's the classroom teacher's show." We ask the classroom teachers to give us their schedules- they're not published anywhere, so no other way to get them. A few teachers send them along right away and for many others it's like pulling teeth.

My teammates say just not to bother if the classroom teacher doesn't give the information. Obviously if they wanted support they'd give the times. However, I worry that looks bad to parents. We say in every IEP meeting, "We'll check in with you at conferences."

I try to just pop in, explain the IEP progress report, and ask the parents if they have any questions about the child's IEP. I have so many scheduled at the same time now that I can't stay the whole time even if someone wanted me to.

In my district, conferences are scheduled so that all special ed teachers can attend with the general ed teacher.

If a student is in intervention, the reading specialist attends all those conferences. If the child is not part of her intervention classes, she asks for short progress reports from the interventionists, and then she presents the report to parents.

I have always worked at places where parents have to RSVP to schedule a conference time. That usually ended up being about five kids when I taught resource and maybe three would show up, so I had no problem being there for most meetings.

The regular ed teachers were always good about including me, but it was their show. I should qualify that I generally saw my resource students for 60 minutes max in a given school day.

This is my first year working with resource students, but I've worked many years as an interventionist and ED teacher. In the past I've always been invited to and asked to participate in conferences. This year was the first year that I discovered teachers didn't want me there. I work with some of their students 90 minutes a day, and I felt like I NEEDED to be at conferences. But some of the gen ed teachers this year seemed to think my input wasn't needed.

Our parents also RSVP, but it's all online and each teacher has created their own password and login. They either need to send us the link so we can see the whole schedule (there is no way to look it up without knowing that specific teacher's link) or send the times for our students. I only have 1-2 parents each year who don't sign up. I work in K-3 where parents still tend to be pretty interested in this sort of thing.

I get that it's their show and part of me is happy that they're owning all of the kids instead of seeing them as just "my kids." I really just worry about how it looks to parents. I guess in my mind if we're not really going to worry about conferences, we need to stop telling parents we'll be at them in IEP meetings and instead tell them to specifically seek us out if they have questions.

I see most of my kids for about an hour a day as well, but my needier students are also spending time with interventionists, EL teachers, OT/SLP/Psych, etc. Between all of their services, grade level intervention blocks, and EL time (lots of my kids are EL), lunch/recess and specials, some of them are literally spending about the same time with their classroom teacher as they are with me, and I have them for multiple years.